“What got us to the moon was a very specific, targeted goal and cross-sectoral investment and innovation…why can’t we do that to reduce our carbon emissions?”
Glyn Davis AC, Mariana Mazzucato, Sarah Pearson and John Thwaites at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne.
On 13 December, CPD, the City of Melbourne and the Monash Sustainable Development Institute (MSDI) co-hosted a public forum with Mariana Mazzucato on ‘The Value of Everything’. At her biggest public event in Melbourne, Professor Mazzucato took her ideas to another full house of over 200 people. She focused especially on the interplay between mission-led innovation, inclusive growth and cities. She explored the role of the public sector in creating real value in the economy, tearing apart popular myths about the relative roles of the public and private sectors (‘government bad, business good’) in innovation and development.
Following her keynote, Mariana Mazzucato was joined by a panel including Professor John Thwaites, Chair MSDI, Dr Sarah Pearson – Chief Scientist and Chief Innovation Officer, DFAT, and Professor Glyn Davis AC – Distinguished Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra. The panel discussed how risk aversion, a loss of public trust and negative portrayals of the public sector is limiting Australia’s policy prospects.
In the discussion, recurring themes about the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals as a set of big challenges increasingly common across many countries and the need for much bolder and more diverse collaboration between the public sector, businesses, innovators and entrepreneurs were drawn out and emphasised.
Full video recording of this event here:
Meet the panel
Professor John Thwaites
Chair, Monash Sustainable Development Institute
Dr Sarah Pearson
Chief Innovation Officer & Chief Scientist, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Sarah Pearson has been involved in various parts of the innovation sector, from basic research into particle physics, to research into diagnosing cancer as a physics academic, head of Open Innovation at Cadbury (Mrs Willy Wonka), management consulting at McKinsey for high tech companies and CEO of ANU Enterprise. Sarah has also provided innovation advice to several governments in Australia and overseas.
Professor Glyn Davis AC
Distinguished Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Glyn Davis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University and Chair of the ANZSOG Research Committee. Since 2018, Professor Davis has also been elected a Visiting Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford.
Full house at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne
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